Now, people have an advantage in that we can use pesticides and cover up for protection, but how the hell does anything in the wild deal with that? You could kill a thousand of the little fuckers that land on you, but there’s a thousand more after that you still have to deal with, and there’s more than that waiting their turn. They’re little, but in these numbers it seems they’d have the ability to bleed you dry.
And the black flies, the little black flies
Always the black fly, no matter where you go
I’ll die with the black fly a-picking my bones
In north on-tar-i-o-i-o, in north on-tar-i-o
Animals are covered in fur.
Animals have built in flyswatters (tails)
Animals roll in mud.
Animals get in the water.
Animals can run away.
Nothing is fool proof. I imagine the young, old and injured animals are taken out, regularly.
Presumably, the black fly species has some genes that inherently limit how fast the flies can reproduce and how large and voracious the swarms can get.
Otherwise, consider what would happen if a sub-species of flies were too good at bleeding animals dry. They would extinct every land animal within the reachable area, then go extinct themselves.
I would suspect in the geologic past - over the last billion years of nature having these kind of arms races - this has probably happened many times.
Sometimes they do. Some years ago I saw mention of a year in which black fly swarms in east Africa were exceptionally large, causing misery for the local wildlife. The article I saw included pictures of lions with festering sores from having been bitten (and subsequently scratched themselves) to wretched excess.
As someone who has had to (try to) endure black flies, I almost felt sorry for those two guys, the confessed murderers, running from the police in northern Canada a few months ago. I am not surprised they killed themselves.
ISTR I read that in the muskeg that during the summer caribou can lose a liter of blood a day to black flies and mosquitoes. Having been in the High Arctic in summer I can say they really and truly could drive you mad!
Gathering blueberries in the New Hampshire swamps there were times we looked down at our legs and we seemed to have grey fur; that was the mosquitoes. The black flies would hit you on the beach, and I can remember trying desperately to wash them all out of my hair which at the time was long and white-blonde. The only solution was to immerse yourself in the waves. Once your skin hit a certain level of saltiness they would bite much less. I would imagine that the animal’s sweat has a similar effect eventually.
We used to believe that letting your skin get “really pruney” in the water was a help too, but this is all just the anecdotal recollections of a small child.
Be careful there. ISTM you’re venturing into group selection territory, which will open up a whole can of Darwinistic worms (should I say larvae?;))! Not saying it couldn’t happen, but it would require some rather unusual mechanism to work – like the slow-reproducing flies actively protecting their prey from the more voracious, fast-breeding variety!
It wasn’t that long ago researchers were shocked to find that hummingbirds are quite the little predators, eating huge volumes of insects relative to their size. There are all sorts of environmental pressures that can limit any given organism’s ability to over populate; I’ve never heard of self-limiting DNA being one of them though.
And believe me if you’d ever encountered a black fly swarm you’d know, there is next to nothing holding them back. :shudder:
Army ants have a nasty sting, but they’re easy to avoid. If you accidentally walk into the middle of a swarm, with a few quick steps you’re out. I’d much rather deal with army ants than black flies, which are impossible to avoid without covering up.
Just the flies that are too voracious - or too close in gene possibility space to the too voracious species - are extinct because they burned themselves out.
Same reason there’s likely no technical reason ebola can’t be as contagious as a cold.
It seems as the population of predators, such as those flies, has a large impact on the population of the prey. Ticks are hurting moose to a larger degree as the moose population increases.
